Eye movement monitoring is gaining increasing importance in law enforcement and counter-terrorism, as well as psychiatric and other medical evaluative applications to evaluate the tendencies of, for example, sex offender, terrorists, psychiatric patients and others.
Current technology that attempts to identify the subject's interest may rely on measurements of where the subject is looking within an image (the overt attentional focus), or measurements of the duration that subjects look at a given image. Reaction time measures of viewing, questionnaires and direct interrogation, as well as direct eye position measurements (preferentially looking at items of interest) are examples of these measures. These technologies suffer from the problem that the subject is often aware that the measurements are being made and thus can easily misdirect the interrogator by intentionally or unintentionally looking at a given image for an inappropriate long or short duration, or by looking at irrelevant parts of the image.
Recently, eye movement monitoring is gaining increasing importance in the evaluation of interest that focus groups have in particular visual elements in commercial advertising. These analyses are also used in psychiatric and other medical applications to evaluate, for example, the tendencies of sex offenders and the progress of their therapeutic regimen. Thus, a reliable way to painlessly and non-invasively determine the position of secret military assets on a map, the actual position of covert interest of a consumer within a commercial advertisement, the position of a secret terrorist hiding place within a map, or the focus of deviant interest of a suspect within an image during a clinical or criminal investigation, will lead to huge advances in many fields.